Synchronizing my to-do list from Obsidian to a Notion database

I've started using Obsidian quite a lot, as it's a fantastic note-taking utility with a lot of advanced features, plugins, and community support.

I've started using Obsidian quite a lot, as it's a fantastic note-taking utility with a lot of advanced features, plugins, and community support. I know others who use Notion, and while I've been trying to get to grips with it, there are some things I'd like to keep in both services at all times. That's why I wrote a Python script that allows me to synchronize my to-do list from Obsidian to a Notion database.

In order to use this script, you'll need to follow the instructions outlined below in order to generate an integration token for your Notion database. You can then give your integration access to your selected database, and it will be able to read and write to it as it needs to. Notion has a lot of different integrations readily available, but we're going to be creating our own combined with a pre-made template.

As well, this is mostly a proof of concept. While it may be useful to some in its current state, this article is designed to help you get to grips with the Notion API and build your own integrations.

Setting up API access in Notion

Notion's API is easy to use

First and foremost, Notion's API is really easy to use and quite well-documented. It can be quite hard to get started if you're not too familiar, so we'll walk you through the steps in order to create your own integration. The pictures above can also be used as a reference to ensure that you are creating the integration correctly.

Next, we'll need to create the Notion database that your notes will be stored in. We're going to use the To-do List template on Notion, though we'll need to remove some additional fields. This template turns each task into its own page so that you can enter additional information.

Now that we have our template ready, click the "..." button (to the left of "New") and click "Customize To-dos". Click "Tasks" to remove it from the database. This will allow us to modify the fields in the template, where we can remove the "Assign" and "Due" fields. I also renamed "Task name" to simply "Name".

Finally, we'll finish by adding our integration to the page, so that it can edit the page. Go to the very top right of the page, where there's another "..." button. Click that, hover over "Connections" and scroll down to the integration that we created. Click it, and confirm that you want to give it access to the page.

Now with our page set up, we can move on to deploying the script to synchronize our Obsidian notes with Notion!

Setting up our script

You need your database ID, integration token, and Markdown file name

The script that I've written can be found on GitHub, and it's pretty easy to get set up. You'll need to have Python installed on your machine, and you'll need to place the downloaded script in the same folder as your Obsidian notes. The only required Python library that doesn't already come preinstalled is the requests library, which you can install with the following command:

pip3 install requests

Next, you'll need to replace the NOTION_TOKEN, DATABASE_ID, and TASKS variables defined at the start of the file with your details. The token is the integration token that we created earlier, and the database ID is found in the URL of the Notion database we created. The database ID is everything after "notion.so/" and everything before "?v=..." For example, a database ID might look like the following:

1bd1ef8871068079b3f7e7a515dc292b

Finally, replace "tasks.md" with the actual name of the markdown file that you use to track your tasks. I used tasks.md to test this script, but if you already have a daily tracker, you can change the name to match the file where they're stored.

Running the script

Now that we have everything in place, we can run the script! Simply open a terminal in the folder and run the following command:

python3 synctasks.py

This will then connect to your Notion database with your integration token, read your markdown file, and synchronize its contents with the server. You can also automate the running of the script so that it synchronizes multiple times a day. It will remove tasks that you delete from your notes, and it will also update the status if you change them from incomplete to completed (or vice versa).

This is a very basic script that will get you started with the Notion API, and you can expand on its functionality to do a lot more than just manage